FRANCIS WI1.L0GHBY. 
37 
and fishing. Alexander also took with him, on 
his Asiatic expedition, more than a thousand 
persons for the same purpose. But these un- 
paralleled advantages owed their chief value to 
the powers of the philosopher’s mind, and to the 
system of inquiry which he applied to the ani- 
mal kingdom, — a system employed, but not 
improved, by Bacon and Newton in their several 
researches. 
He possessed also that other rare, but indis- 
pensable qualification, — a mind totally devoid t>f 
prejudice. He utterly discarded every tradition 
of his countrymen respecting any animal, how- 
ever venerable that animal had become by the 
connection with it of their religious belief. 
Actuated by the same perfect love of truth, he 
adopted the most literal description of facts, 
instead of the rhetorical style ^employed by other 
teachers of philosophy, not excepting his own 
venerated instructor. According to some writers, 
he must have composed more than four hundred 
treatises, of which no more than forty-eight are 
extant, and not one of these in a perfect state. 
His history of animals, four volumes octavo, 
which it is most congruous to the object of this 
sketch to notice, is, in the judgment of an emi- 
nent naturalist, “ composed ' in a method so 
luminous, as not yet to have been equalled by 
any subsequent writer.” The principal divisions 
which are still adopted by naturalists in the ani- 
mal kingdom are those of Aristotle ; and he pro- 
posed some, which have been resumed af|er 
